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Right to repair’s unlikely new adversary: Scientologists

The right-to-repair movement has had its share of adversaries. From Big Tech to politicians and individuals who don’t think product repairability should be government-mandated, it has been a tedious battle for a movement that has seen major wins lately. One of the most recent wins came from Apple, a former DIY repair combatant, supporting repairability legislation. But taking Apple’s place is a new entity aiming to limit right-to-repair legislation: Scientologists.

Today, 404 Media reported on a letter sent on August 10 to the US Copyright Office by Ryland Hawkins of Author Services Inc. The company, its website and letterhead say, represents the “literary, theatrical, and musical works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late founder of Scientology. Author Services, according to records archived via the WayBackMachine, is owned by the Church of Spiritual Technology, which describes itself as a church within Scientology.

The letter addresses Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which “makes it unlawful to circumvent technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works.” The Scientology group’s letter seeks to alter exemptions granted for self-repairing some consumer electronics, like video game consoles, laptops, home appliances, and farming tractors.

Author Services’ letter argues that while that exemption works for the “many consumer devices” that include “unilateral ‘shrink-wrap’ licenses governing the terms of use of the software,” they shouldn’t apply to devices that “can only be purchased and used by someone who possess [sic] particular qualifications or has been specifically trained in the use of the device.” With those products, the license agreement is “negotiated and agreed to in advance” of purchase and may include restrictions that are critical to “safe and proper” device usage.

The Scientology-tied group seeks an amendment to the exemption so that it doesn’t apply to software-powered devices that can only be purchased by someone with particular qualifications or training or that use software “governed by a license agreement negotiated and executed” before purchase.

Before we get into what horse the Church of Scientology could have in the right-to-repair race, let’s consider whether its amendment is extreme.

“It’s a totally unreasonable proposal,” Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability at iFixit, told Ars Technica. “I can imagine manufacturers using the presence of a ‘quick start’ guide for a product as evidence that their consumers are ‘specially trained in use of the device’ and thus denying broad access to repair.”

She noted that such an amendment would render the proposed exemptions for commercial and industrial equipment from right-to-repair activists “toothless.”

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Ex-Chris Christie aide arrested on suspicion of sex crimes

A former Chris Christie aide has been charged in connection with a child sex investigation, New Jersey Globe reports.

Kevin Tomafsky, 41, was arrested Aug. 15 after a grand jury indicted him in July, the report said. He was charged with engaging in sexual conduct with a child, conspiracy to endanger the welfare of a child, permitting a child to engage in pornography, and the possession of child pornography, the report said.

Tomafsky’s arrest culminated a probe that began in October 2022 when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children alerted the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s office it received a report from Snapchat of an alleged incident depicting child sex was uploaded to the platform.

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Injured person reportedly dies after Cruise cars block first responders

On Aug. 14, two stalled Cruise vehicles delayed an ambulance from leaving the scene of a crash in which a driver had hit a pedestrian with their car, according to reports from the San Francisco Fire Department. The pedestrian later died of their injuries, which first responders linked to the delay in getting them to the hospital. 

“The fact that Cruise autonomous vehicles continue to block ingress and egress to critical 911 calls is unacceptable,” one emergency responder wrote in a report. Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo countered that one of the cars cleared the scene and that traffic to the right of it remained unblocked. “The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do,” she wrote in a statement to SFGATE. 

According to several reports written by first responders, first obtained by Forbes, emergency personnel arrived at Seventh Street and Harrison in SoMa and began treating a “critically injured” pedestrian who had been struck by a car. The patient was quickly loaded into an ambulance, but the ambulance driver was unable to immediately leave the scene, according to two reports written by members of the ambulance team.

Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene, according to one of the reports, forcing the ambulance to wait while first responders attempted to manually move the Cruise vehicles or locate an officer who could move the police car. 

Collectively, these interferences “contributed to a poor patient outcome, delaying the definitive care required in severe trauma cases,” according to one of the reports. The patient reportedly died of their injuries approximately 30 minutes after arriving at San Francisco General Hospital.

SFFD representatives did not immediately respond to SFGATE’s request for comment. 

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Marijuana Is the Sixth Biggest Cash Crop In The US

According to the Leafly Cannabis Harvest Report 2022, marijuana was the sixth most valuable wholesale crop in the United States last year at a $5 billion worth, trailing only corn, soybeans, hay, wheat and cotton.

The calculation includes only crops in states where state-sanctioned sales of legal weed are already up and running and exclude production in medical marijuana-only states.

Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports that 2022 saw a cannabis harvest of 2,834 metric tons, up 24 percent from 2021.

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Newly-Released Top Secret Docs Show Nixon’s Intel Briefings On US-Backed Chilean Coup

Two fifty-year old documents related to the coup in Chile were released by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department last week. The democratically elected, left wing government of President Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973 by the Chilean military, with covert CIA backing. A US-supported dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet was subsequently installed.

President Richard Nixon’s daily briefs related to the coup on September 8th as well as the 11th – the day the Chilean military seized control of the government – were released. This declassification followed repeated calls for increased transparency by progressive members of Congress, human rights groups, and Santiago.

Nixon and then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger strongly opposed the leftist Allende government and attempted to prevent its rule. George Washington University’s National Security Archive issued a statement which says “[the documents] contained information that went to President Nixon as a military takeover that he and [Kissinger] had encouraged for three years came to fruition.”

Nixon’s daily brief for September 8, 1973 reads “a number of reports have been received… indicating the possibility of an early military coup… Navy men plotting to overthrow the government now claim army and air force support.”

The document – written three days before the coup – continues with a discussion of how a fascist paramilitary group “has been blocking roads and provoking clashes with the national police, adding to the tension caused by continuing strikes and opposition political moves. President Allende earlier this week said he believed the armed forces will ask for his resignation if he does not change his economic and political policies.”

On September 11th, Nixon’s daily brief said “Plans by navy officers to trigger military action against the Allende government are supported by some key army units… The navy is also counting on help from the air force and national police.”

After Allende’s initial refusal to resign, tanks opened fire, Air Force aircraft launched rocket attacks and bombed the presidential palace. Troops stormed in and Allende shot himself.

“What followed [the coup] was a vicious, decades-long reign of terror and repression during which tens of thousands of Chileans were killed, tortured, or disappeared by the Pinochet regime, which continued to receive support from the CIA,” as Common Dreams’ Jake Johnson has written.

Indeed, in 2000, the CIA conceded that “many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses… Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or [US] military.”

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U.S. SPY AGENCY DREAMS OF SURVEILLANCE UNDERWEAR IT’S CALLING “SMART EPANTS”

THE FUTURE OF wearable technology, beyond now-standard accessories like smartwatches and fitness tracking rings, is ePANTS, according to the intelligence community. 

The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop “smart” clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection.

Billed as the “largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles,” the SMART ePANTS — Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems — program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable.

The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community’s secretive counterpart to the military’s better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA’s website says it “invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community.” Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures.

“A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator,” Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” told The Intercept. “It may or may not stick.”

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Vaccines to prevent fentanyl, heroin overdose close to human trials

Researchers are expected to begin human clinical trials in early 2024 to test the safety and efficacy of vaccines to prevent heroin and fentanyl overdoses. While there is still a way to go, if approved, the vaccines could revolutionize the treatment of opioid addiction and reduce the number of deaths resulting from overdose.

Opioids – especially synthetic opioids – are the main driver of drug-related overdose deaths. The availability of drugs like heroin and fentanyl continues to feed the problem of opioid dependence and places users at risk of death. They’re also difficult drugs to quit.

Drug use and associated overdoses not only burden the loved ones of the person who died, but they also inflict an economic burden. In 2017, the costs for opioid use disorder and fatal opioid overdose in the US were estimated to be US$1.02 trillion.

While the streets are unlikely to ever be clear of drugs like heroin and fentanyl – and, even if they were, they’d probably be replaced by other, equally damaging drugs – researchers at the University of Montana (UM) are close to trialing the next best thing in tackling the opioid epidemic: vaccines to prevent fentanyl and heroin overdose and aid in treating opioid dependence.

The development of the vaccines began with Marco Pravetoni, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington, who, along with his research team, has been working on vaccines against opioids for more than 10 years.

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That School Is Still Treading on Jaiden Rodriguez’s Free Speech Rights

The case of 12-year-old Jaiden Rodriguez is not quite closed. While the Vanguard School’s board of directors has declared that he may sport a “don’t tread on me” patch on his backpack, a closer look at the school district’s policies suggests that administrators are still inclined to tread all over Rodriguez’s free speech rights.

That’s according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment advocacy organization. FIRE spoke with Jaiden’s mother, who said that contrary to the board’s public statement, a district official—Mike Claudio, assistant superintendent of Harrison School District Two in Colorado Springs, Colorado—told her that her son would only be allowed to display the Gadsden flag patch as long as no one else complained about it.

Moreover, Rodriguez is still prohibited from displaying a secondary patch that references the Firearms Policy Coalition and expresses support for the Second Amendment. The justification for this restriction is the district’s categorical ban on content having to do with alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and weapons.

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A Putin Critic Fell to His Death in Washington. We Still Don’t Know Why.

Almost exactly a year before the plane crash that killed mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, local police in D.C. were called to investigate the case of another former Moscow businessperson who also fell from the sky.

Twelve months later, the plunge from an M Street apartment building of Dan Rapoport, a Soviet-born U.S. citizen who made a mint in post-communist Russia before souring on the regime, remains unexplained.

Tellingly, it’s been largely forgotten in Washington.

Though international media gave the story a lot of ink, the city had paid little attention — even though it involved a ghastly local death of a man who once moved in elite circles and owned the house that later became the Kalorama residence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Now, with the Prigozhin crash focusing new attention on murky Kremlin-adjacent deaths, some allies of Rapoport are speaking up about their unhappiness with Washington’s investigation of his demise, something city police almost immediately said likely didn’t involve foul play.

“There’s something here that doesn’t add up for me,” says Jason Jay Smart, a Kyiv-based American political consultant and outspoken pro-Ukraine media figure who was close with Rapoport. “Those who knew him — I’ve talked to a lot of venture capitalists — nobody is convinced he just up and decided to jump.”

“The main thing that’s happened is something that hasn’t happened: It’s that the law enforcement authorities in Washington, D.C. have not come up with anything more conclusive about what took place,” says another longtime associate, Bill Browder, the onetime Moscow financier turned bestselling Kremlin antagonist. “This is a very serious issue. He’s an American citizen who was an enemy of Vladimir Putin who came to an untimely death. That warrants a serious investigation.”

Confounding critics is the tight-lipped public posture adopted by the capital’s Metropolitan Police Department in the days after Rapoport’s death — and still evident today, even as tallies of dubious Russian-insider suicides add up around the world.

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GOP Congressman’s Bill Would Cut Federal Funding For States And Tribes That Legalize Marijuana

Legislation introduced on Friday by a North Carolina congressman seeks to slash a portion of federal funding to individual U.S. states as well as Native tribes that legalize marijuana.

The so-called Stop Pot Act, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC), would withhold 10 percent of federal highway funding to jurisdictions “in which the purchase or public possession of marijuana for recreational purposes is lawful.” Introduction of the bill comes less than a week before a tribe in Edwards’s home state votes on an adult-use marijuana legalization referendum.

Edwards argues that state and tribal laws allowing cannabis use by adults are an affront to U.S. law.

“The laws of any government should not infringe on the overall laws of our nation, and federal funds should not be awarded to jurisdictions that willfully ignore federal law,” he said in a press release. “During a time when our communities are seeing unprecedented crime, drug addiction, and mental illness, the Stop Pot Act will help prevent even greater access to drugs and ease the strain placed on our local law enforcement and mental health professionals who are already stretched thin.”

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